Camera kits that come back complete: tracking gear in a small production company
The follow-focus is missing from the FX6 case and two DPs both think they have that body on Tuesday. How small production companies track kit without a rental-house system.
In this article
- Number the cases, not just the bodies
- Tape the packing list inside the lid
- One calendar per body, not one calendar
- The return check
- Sub-rentals, briefly
- What this is not
- Where Itefy fits
The shoot wrapped Friday. Monday morning the FX6 case comes back open on the bench and the follow-focus is not in it.
Meanwhile two DPs both believe they have that body on Tuesday, because one of them asked you in a corridor in week one and the other put it in the calendar. By eleven you are on the phone to a rental house paying day rate for a camera you own, which is currently in the boot of somebody's car in Salford.
None of this is dramatic, and all of it is expensive. Here is the setup that prevents most of it, for a company with a cage rather than a rental department.
Number the cases, not just the bodies
Most gear cages start by numbering the valuable things — bodies, lenses, the recorder — and treat the case as packaging.
Reverse it. The case is the unit that moves, and it is the thing somebody signs for. Give every case a number, big enough to read from across the cage, and treat what is inside it as its contents rather than as separate loans.
The individual pieces still need their own records — you want the serial of each body, and you want to know that lens 3 is the one that back-focuses — but the thing that leaves the building is the case.
Tape the packing list inside the lid
Laminated, on the inside of the lid, listing exactly what should be in that case.
This is the cheapest thing on this page and it prevents the most expensive failure. A kit is checked against its own list at return, by whoever is standing there, in about ninety seconds. A missing follow-focus found on Monday morning with the assistant present is a question. The same follow-focus found on Wednesday, when the case is next opened on location, is a sub-rental and a bad afternoon.
Update the list when the kit changes. A list that is wrong twice teaches everybody to ignore it.
One calendar per body, not one calendar
The double-booking failure is almost never carelessness. It is that "the camera" is booked in one place and "the FX6" in another, and neither entry is against a specific serial-numbered body.
Two rules:
- Book the physical item, identified, not the category.
FX6 #2, not "an FX6". - One place where bookings live, and one person or system that sees all of them. A shared Google Calendar is genuinely fine at three people; it stops working the moment somebody books by text message.
Include prep and return days in the booking. A camera out Saturday is not free on Friday — it needs checking, charging and packing.
The return check
At the bench, with whoever brought it back still there:
- Open the case, read the list, count it.
- Anything missing goes on the record now, against that job.
- Power up the body and the monitor. A dead battery door found in the cage is a repair; found on location it is the shoot.
- Anything damaged gets photographed and flagged so it does not go out again.
That last point is the one people skip. A case that is back but faulty is worse than one that is late, because it will be loaded for the next job by somebody who assumes it is fine.
Sub-rentals, briefly
When you rent in, photograph the kit at collection and at return, and keep the photographs with the job. Sub-rental damage disputes are almost always about whether a scuff was already there, and the party with a timestamped photograph is the party who does not pay.
Give the rented item a record for the duration of the job, in its own location, so it does not quietly become part of your permanent inventory in somebody's head.
What this is not
Two things this article is deliberately not about, because they get bundled in and they are different problems:
- Media and footage management. Cards, drives, LTO, who has which rushes. That is a data problem with its own tools, and asset tracking has nothing useful to say about it.
- Plant-scale rental logistics. If you run a rental house with a counter and a rate card, you need a rental platform with invoicing and a storefront, not this.
Where Itefy fits
The habits above are the substance and a spreadsheet can carry them for a while. Where it stops is when the cage is not where the person is.
In Itefy, a kit is one bookable thing — book the case and everything in it moves with it, so a DP reserving the FX6 package cannot accidentally take the body and leave the matte box behind. Because bookings are against identified items, a clash is caught at the moment the second booking is made, named, rather than discovered at 8am on a Tuesday.
At return, the phone app can audit a kit against its own contents: scan the case, scan what is in it, and it reports what is missing before the assistant has left the bench — the laminated list, enforced. Faults get reported from the phone with a photo, and an item marked inoperative stops being available for the next booking until it is signed off.
Two honest limits: the audit is kit-scoped — there is no whole-cage stocktake — and there is no GPS, so an item's location is where somebody last put it. See film and TV production, or start a 14-day free trial with no card and load one camera package.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Every accessory worth replacing should exist as its own record, but you should book and hand over the kit, not the pieces. The list is for checking against at return; the booking is for the case as a whole.
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Give it a temporary record for the duration, in its own location. Sub-rentals are where crews get billed for damage they cannot disprove, and a hand-out photograph is worth more than the paperwork.
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Book the body itself rather than "a camera", and use something that flags the clash when the second booking is entered — not a shared calendar where two entries can sit side by side looking fine.